Related papers: An Empirical Study on Maintainable Method Size in …

Many software metrics are designed to measure aspects that are believed to be related to software quality. Static software metrics, e.g., size, complexity and coupling are used in defect prediction research as well as software quality…

Many internal software metrics and external quality attributes of Java programs correlate strongly with program size. This knowledge has been used pervasively in quantitative studies of software through practices such as normalization on…

Performance is a critical quality attribute in software development, yet the impact of method-level code changes on performance evolution remains poorly understood. While developers often make intuitive assumptions about which types of…

An eye-tracking study of 18 developers reading and summarizing Java methods is presented. The developers provide a written summary for methods assigned to them. In total, 63 methods are used from five different systems. Previous studies on…

Code readability and software complexity are important software quality metrics that impact other software metrics such as maintainability, reusability, portability and reliability. This paper presents an empirical study of the…

During compilation from Java source code to bytecode, some information is irreversibly lost. In other words, compilation and decompilation of Java code is not symmetric. Consequently, the decompilation process, which aims at producing…

Developers often extract methods to improve readability, understanding, and reuse, while inlining keeps logic in one block. Prior work based on static metrics has not shown clear differences between these practices, and the human side of…

In object-oriented programming, it is reasonable to hypothesize that smaller classes with fewer methods are less complex. Should this hypothesis hold true, it would be advisable for programmers to design classes with fewer methods, as…

Exaggeration or context changes can render maintainability experience into prejudice. For example, JavaScript is often seen as least elegant language and hence of lowest maintainability. Such prejudice should not guide decisions without…

Modern software development depends on APIs to reuse code and increase productivity. As most software systems, these libraries and frameworks also evolve, which may break existing clients. However, the main reasons to introduce breaking…

Following code style conventions in software projects is essential for maintaining overall code quality. Adhering to these conventions improves maintainability, understandability, and extensibility. Additionally, following best practices…

Context: Code refactoring is widely recognized as an essential software engineering practice that improves the understandability and maintainability of source code. Several studies attempted to detect refactoring activities through mining…

This paper presents Megadiff, a dataset of source code diffs. It focuses on Java, with strict inclusion criteria based on commit message and diff size. Megadiff contains 663 029 Java diffs that can be used for research on commit…

Despite huge software engineering efforts and programming language support, resource and memory leaks are still a troublesome issue, even in memory-managed languages such as Java. Understanding the properties of leak-inducing defects, how…

The context of this work is specification, detection and ultimately removal of detectable harmful patterns in source code that are associated with defects in design and implementation of software. In particular, we investigate five code…

There are possible benefits and drawbacks to chaining methods together, as is often done in fluent APIs. A prior study investigated how Java developers chain methods in over 2.7k open-source projects. That study observed, for the dataset…

In software engineering (SE) tasks, the naming approach is so important that it attracts many scholars from all over the world to study how to improve the quality of method names. To accurately recommend method names, we employ a novel…

In the past couple of decades, significant research efforts have been devoted to the prediction of software bugs (i.e., defects). In general, these works leverage a diverse set of metrics, tools, and techniques to predict which classes,…

Source Code Summarization is the task of writing short, natural language descriptions of source code. The main use for these descriptions is in software documentation e.g. the one-sentence Java method descriptions in JavaDocs. Code…

Software systems are designed according to guidelines and constraints defined by business rules. Some of these constraints define the allowable or required values for data handled by the systems. These data constraints usually originate…